Overton's Overture

This volume has not been easy. A few stories have been wonderful, but many have been narratively and ideologically frustrating. Today's story was perhaps the most challenging to finish. If this blog is unsuccessful at everything else, I hope, at the very least, it can provide an account of my relationship to each story. This is the final post for the volume dedicated to "Romance." The slipperiness of that categorization has provided us with tales of fraught love, impossible dedication to the sea, and idealizations of other people. Amidst the wide range it has been hard to find a through-line However, what I think links these tales together is a focus on the capacity of an individual to dedicate themselves to something beyond all expectations. In " The Star Spangled Manner " we learned of how Bill Emlow's negotiation of his British and American identity was used to help him find love with Lady Angela. In " The Token " Epes Calef's life ...

In the last post I expressed that my surprise at how long it took to find an author like Joseph Hergesheimer; in today’s post I am frustrated that only now—in the fifteenth post—have we come to the first story written by a woman.   “Purple and Fine Linen” was written by May Edginton, a British writer whose work Hollywood frequently adapted. Stars like Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur moved across the screen in the various cinematic translations of Edginton’s work which began in 1912 with the short Double Cross and ended in 1936 with The Manhattan Adventure . More than a dozen films had their story sourced from Edginton’s work. Accomplished directors like Frank Borzage worked on one film while Alfred Hitchcock was the art director for Dangerous Virtue , which began as a play by Edginton.  Unexpectedly but disturbingly it is hard to find information on Edington other than the most basic notations: she lived from 1883 to 1957. This lack of info...

To recount a memory is often to embrace the romantic possibility that things went the right way. Even if they didn’t. Yesterday, I discussed how Kyne’s story of Bill Emlow and Dad Tully was framed around Dad recounting the past as a lesson. Romance blossomed in Bill's persistent entreaties to Lady Angela and Dad used that fortuitous foundering of love to prescribe possibilities for the future. Joseph Conrad considering tales of the sea he has heard The past was the map to move forward. In Kyne’s ever moving forward progression of time, it was important for Dad to create an American identity and thus an American past that could resonate in perpetuity. “This could have occurred nowhere but in England where men and seas interpenetrate, so to speak” are the first words of Joseph Conrad’s “Youth.” Conrad’s tale follows a similar framing device, but the narrators are much less assured of any nationalist bombast.  Around a table sit five men. They drink. They share. Marl...